Replacing Gaffgarion and Agrias

[RandMuadDib]

So i condensed down gaffy and agrias to one sprite each and replaced the sprites that i had freed up. I also made sure to have all of the ENTD occurrences of them be their sprites and not the ones i replaced. It worked great for the opening battle and all of chapter one.

But then i got to chapter two. i knew something was fishy right away when my replaced sprites (tifa and sephiroth) were talking instead of the intended agrias and gaffgarion. Then i got to the zeirchelle falls battle. Saving beforehand, i ran through the battle twice. The first time i used tifa and sephiroth. Again, they were reciting the lines that were supposed to be for gaffgarion and agrias. But then when i defeated the real gaffgarion, both sephiroth and gaffgarion teleported away. After the battle, sephiroth was no longer in my party (neither was the guest gaffgarion). After reloading, i went through the battle using generics instead of tifa and sephiroth. The proper characters recited their lines properly, but sephiroth was still missing from my party upon completing this battle.

Does this happen to everyone who replaces their characters? is there away around it? perhaps i missed something in the ENTD? or would this be something i'd have to fix with asm hacking? I could live without sephiroth but i really like my tifa character (I made new abilities for her and everything, beat rush, dolphin blow, meteor strike and final heaven). I don't want her to disappear when agrias leaves my party with ovelia. Should i just replace a different sprite instead of agrias? Any help, suggestions, or insight would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I continued on the story until the point where agrias leaves the party. Agrias stayed in my party and tifa left. Perhaps this information may help. I also just checked my patch, ETND has agrias 1E meeting with draclau, ovelia, and mustadio, but my tifa is (former Agrias) 34. 34 is the job/sprite that disappeared from my party.

[Zozma]

heres the thing because i had the same problems when i condensed my gaffy and agrias to 1 each. you need to keep gaffy number 17 and Agrias number 34 as the "original" characters (also alma number 30 and mustadeo guest)  you should NOT allow those alternates to join before the times that those units leave the party because the game will go strait for them first if they are there even if your condensed Aggy and Gaffy are set to their proper unitID in ENTD

there is a way to change which ones leave the party (or disable that in general), i forget if its in event editor or if u had to do it with a hex editor tho...

[RandMuadDib]

Thanks zozma. What i ended up doing was switching to the psx version, moving some non-battle characters to another, open, location, using those newly opened spots for my custom characters, and hexing the proper unit.bin values. Unfortunately i wanted to use the FFT:Complete as a base, but it doesnt seem possible to use FFTacText with FFT:C, and melonhead doesnt seem to be around anymore to update TacText. From what i understand, the FFT:C team used a special, non-public version of TacText and i can't seem to get hold of it.

[Zozma]

oh the old version?

[philsov]

Rand:  A common workaround is to open up the fft:c iso with tactext, make changes, save the file, close program, reopen, and then the dte at world.lwz or whatever sometimes goes away.

[RandMuadDib]

zozma: I don't know anything about an 'old version' but i've tried both 457 and 466. Supposedly there's a 478 floating around as well, but i can't seem to find it.

philsov: i tried your workaround, and it didnt work for me. it still hangs when calculating DTE for wldhelp.lzw

[Mimi]

I thought I was impossible to create another character out of the spare Gaff and Agrias because there's only
one formation sprite used for both in UNIT.BIN and one portrait for both of them in WLDFACE.BIN.
If you have found a way around that, please tell me how you did it.

[Zozma]

there IS a way around that, you have to use a hex editor tho. you can change it so the spare gaff OR agrias uses a seperate unit.bin sprite and face